Holding Hands

We remember them, in their early years
at Bates, strolling out College Street or walking across campus, always greeting students they met (with Evelyn sometimes supplying a missing name). In recent years, we remember them arriving together at College events. The 1996 Reunion Awards Ceremony on the Quad comes to mind, when they walked down Campus Avenue as alumni cheered their arrival.

Evelyn Minard Phillips, who died last fall at the age of eighty-seven, was her husband's best friend and supporter, but the first lady of Bates for twenty-two years also established her own presence here, gracing the campus with her unstinting hospitality. She personified the Bates culture, welcoming everyone equally: from young people away from home for the first time to distinguished lecturers and
Commencement speakers.

Barbara Varney Randall '46 remembers Charles and Evelyn Phillips arriving at Bates in 1944. "Evelyn's warmth and friendliness immediately embraced us, and her genuine interest in us was felt happily by us all. When we celebrated our 50th, she and Prexy were with us at our banquet." And, added Elizabeth Morse '46, they went from table to table visiting with everyone.

Bob Dunn '50, who was "doorman" at Commons, describes the Sunday dinners with the Phillips family: "Mrs. Phillips was always able to make the students and staff feel at ease when she walked in with her smile and interest in each of us. She was a very special lady. No wonder Prexy was so obviously proud of her."

Through their years together at Bates, the Phillipses' campus-centered life shifted as his responsibilities expanded into more travel and fund raising. She adjusted, as she did to the changing culture back on campus, where the formal niceties -- teas at their home, for example -- were sometimes lost on the restive youth of the 1960s.

What did not change was their relationship: she was known to her husband as "Buddy" since the day they first met as children, when she invited him to a party at her home.

The Phillipses were friends with Norman Ross '22, for many years the College treasurer, and his wife, Marjorie '23, who remembers driving with Evelyn to Sanford to choose drapery material for the Rand dining hall. Evelyn was concerned that the renovated facility be as attractive as possible for the Bates women who dined there years before coeducational dining came to Bates.

Jack Annett, assistant to the president during the Phillips years, was a student of Charles Phillips at Colgate University, where the future Bates president was a professor. When Charles Phillips was on leave to work in a war agency in Washington, D.C., Evelyn made the transition for her two small children from life in a small town to demands of the capital. She also extended her friendship to the Annett family, who also had made a wartime move to Washington. "It was only natural for Evelyn to
befriend my wife and make her feel comfortable in Washington," Annett said.

Many friends attended the memorial service in the Bates Chapel in October. President Harward spoke at the service, recalling how, nearly a decade ago, Evelyn Phillips welcomed the new president and his wife to Bates.

"[She was]...among the first to welcome us, to open her home to us, to offer, with understanding, a declaration in her own life and manner a model of how to proceed with grace and comfort to others. Whether on the terrace which she so enjoyed [at their Maple Hill home], with her garden plants and song birds, or formally representing the College so ably and frequently over decades, she extended who she was to include each of us."

Her life, said the president, was walked in step with the people around her. In her life and offerings to others we glimpsed what it means to be a partner."

Bates Chaplain Kerry Maloney spoke of the grace with which Evelyn Phillips managed the tension between public responsibilities and private life. "While much of Evelyn Phillips's full life was shared generously and publicly with everyone she met, some of her life always remained a bit of a mystery to those who loved her," Maloney said. "For such a public figure, she maintained a deep sense of privacy. I suspect that for all the obvious beauty of her life...an even deeper beauty animated her, just out of our sight but never out of reach in her presence."